My parents are looking into getting their own NAS to replace iCloud. I don’t really have much experience with that, and zero experience with apple stuff. They are also not very techy, but at least enthusiastic.
Can sombody recommend easy NAS products where you basically just buy a device, do some basic setup, and then it functions as your at-home cloud? I don’t want to get roped into doing too much admin for them, but they do already have DDNS for some other smart home crap. Bonus if it’s non-US tech.
Personally I run a nextcloud server on a VPS that I could expand, that’s not quite selfhosted, I don’t know if that integrates well with apple though, are they better off if I just onboard them onto that?
Cheers in advance
I have an old surplus QNAP. I love it. Very capable, easy to setup, easy to use it and forget about it. Mine is set up for RAID5.
Be certain to get a reliable UPS for it. And have a spare drive on hand.
thanks, I’ll look into it
This. Everyone starts off thinking they’ll buy a NAS and it will just exist for years to come. There is some maintenance and monitoring involved, and if you “set it and forget it”, you can say goodbye to all that data.
Please consider RAID6 or ensure your data is fully backed up. RAID5 falls flat if a drive fails during resilvering the array.
@RunningInRVA
Please don’t label RAID a backup because it is not. RAID 1, 5 or 6 will give you a robust drive pool that is able to recover from a failed drive.
Backups should be done on a different medium and ideally off-site.
@Xaphanos
It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.
Well I wasn’t trying to, exactly. Just trying to convey that RAID5 is not considered reliable and that I was urging the commenter to ensure they have a backup if that’s what they are going to use. Regardless of how you configure your NAS, you can always lose data by mistake.
@RunningInRVA Apologies, I have clearly read your comment wrongly.
And, because a resilver involves significant load on the remaining drives, it’s more likely than you think. If you have drives from the same batch, they likely have the same MTTF.